Tag Archive: The Meaning of Life

I just had an uncanny experience, relating to a book my son sent me. A few days ago I wrote down a little revelation I had: something of an epiphany…

I recalled a book ( a very good book) written by Robert McGee, called “Search for Significance”. McGee’s thesis was that we all crave significance and search for it in different ways-money, power, sex, promotion, popularity, etc. We need, he said, to rather find our significance in Jesus Christ and his total acceptance of us. I agree with that.

However, my little revelation took McGee’s argument in a slightly different direction. I summarized my epiphany thus:

Daily I see many people with stern faces, living in small worlds, and seemingly having no hope in their lives. I’m sure you see them too.

The uncanny experience came this evening while reading a book called “Psycho Cybernetics”, by Maxwell Maltz. His following statement confirmed, as though sent from above, my own observation:

“Today, I am more convinced than ever that what each of us really wants, deep down, is more LIFE. Happiness, success, peace of mind, or whatever your own conception of supreme good may be, is experienced in its essence as-more life”.

I don’t think it’s wrong to seek a meaningful, significant life in human, physical terms, so long as we have things in the right perspective, with God on top and our desires below. But I cannot fail to share the following, a quote from Jesus Christ. The words of Jesus refer not merely to excitement and such things as we can brighten up our daily mortal existence with: these things are temporary and limited. Instead he referred to the ultimate meaning and expression of life, which is Jesus Christ in us:

I am come that they might have life, and that they might have it more abundantly (John 10:10 KJV).

What do you do when you’re down and troubled? Do you cuddle the dog? Do you put the TV on? Do you pop a pill or light a joint?

We’ve probably all had someone tell us when we’re down that there are people worse off than us. That’s supposed to cheer us up. But as a 20th century British comedian, Peter Cook, observed, that just makes us feel bad about the other people as well.

One thing that’s helped me in recent times of feeling down is facing up to the fact that I’m feeling down. And with it I’ve also found comfort in the fact, after all, that others are suffering. I’m not saying that it’s a good thing to suffer, and I’m not saying that we should wallow in our trouble, or that we should not cuddle the dog or do something to “shake out of it”. But there’s a very real sense in which knowing that humanity is born into trouble and suffering, and that just being alive exposes us all to the consequences of being in a fallen world of nature and people…is half of the cure. It’s normal. It’s not an aberration to be down and troubled: it’s natural. It’s part of who we are. It’s life. It’s reality. It’s what humans do.

The other half of the cure (the subject of the third part of my “dark side” series, still to come) is stated clearly in this New Testament quote from Jesus Christ:

I have told you these things so that in me you may have peace. In this world you will have trouble. But take heart! I have overcome the world (John 16:33 NIV).

By facing up to the reality of our human plight, we can also find the answer to it, in Jesus Christ.

I have to apologize for my title – a greater brain could have conceived a better one…

Scientists aren’t allowed to consider even the possibility of design or creation, under threat of ostracism, ridicule, and loss of livelihood. Consequently such bafflingly complex design features as the human brain are just blindly accepted as being another product of chemicals plus a convincingly long period of time. It’s that baffling complexity which got my own brain thinking about itself recently.An average healthy human brain contains some 200 billion nerve cells connected to one another through hundreds of trillions of synapses, so that a single human brain has more information processing units than all the computers, routers and internet connections on the earth. One brain’s memory capacity, even by a conservative estimate, is at least a petabyte, equal to the entire world-wide web. Weighing only three pounds, it is super-energy efficient. The brains internal communications occur at light-speed.*

So if we’re part of the onward and upward evolution of life, why is it that even the most talented and intellectual among us only use a fraction of their brains’ potential? Does that make sense to you? Shouldn’t it be the other way around-that the most intelligent are pushing the boundaries of their brain so that their offspring will have greater brain power, given the additional requirement of an incredibly fortuitous mutation?

Someone may protest that the history of man demonstrates evolution clearly: just look how we’ve developed technology and travel in the last few decades alone. That’s not evolution, that’s development. It’s the result of a snowballing God-given thirst for knowledge, in conjunction with times of relative freedom from war, factions, disease and starvation. You could take a man from what is a very backward tribe, still a reality in some remote parts of the world, assuming that he could stand the shock of the change in lifestyle, and put him through school and university. He has brain power too, and it’s not that of an ape-man.Historians-secular historians-find remarkable the rapidity with which the first civilization in Mesopotamia developed writing, literature, mathematics, geometry, astronomy, business and technology. People weren’t morons crawling out of the trees or muddy fields and making a few marks on a piece of rock or banging two sticks together, one for yes and two for no, in order to communicate. As far back as real history goes, man was intelligent-he just hadn’t got around to building a computer or an airliner yet. He did manage to build such structures as Stonehenge, the Mayan temple and the Pyramids-structures so big and so cleverly put together that we still haven’t figured them out. Some imaginative people have put such structures down to aliens-because, they’re convinced-early man was brainless and clueless. They aren’t allowed or willing to consider the possibility that humans have always had that brain-power potential, right from their creation.

However, some people even in past millennia were able to recognize what professors and educators of today are missing by intent, which is that we humans have been created physically complete and ready to function, and designed by a mind far above our own:

I praise you because I am fearfully and wonderfully made; your works are wonderful, I know that full well.

Most of us have a one-hundred percent chance of dying, and dying is the most common cause of death. So perhaps it requires a little consideration, now and then…

In five years of blogging my most popular post by far has been “The Meaning of Life According to Hamlet, Paul and Deep Thought”. So I decided it was time to discuss the meaning of death. Unfortunately Deep Thought, an imaginary computer invented to calculate the meaning of life, apparently had no opinion on the meaning of death…

Death is pretty popular these days. That may seem like a rather crass statement, but unfortunately, it’s true. Take, for example, the idea in certain religious circles that you can only be sure of getting to heaven by killing yourself along with other people: you prove how great God is by committing suicide and murdering them. That isn’t, incidentally, the God of the Bible.

Death has been explained and explored in as many ways as the human mind can imagine. One of the most popular ideas about death is that we die because we need to have another go at getting life right: reincarnation. Seems like a good idea, eh? Why shouldn’t we get another chance at life if we blow it? The problem is that according to such philosophies the majority of us are going to “blow it” through tens of thousands of life-times. So if you’re not used to dying yet, you’d better start getting used to it now.

(Photo Laurent Belanger)

Unless God puts his foot in the door first-or more specifically, on the Mount of Olives-we all have a one-hundred percent chance of dying. Dying is the most common cause of death. And I don’t mean that flippantly either, because when God warned Adam against disobedience, he meant not that Adam would be zapped on the spot by a lightening bolt the moment he disobeyed, but that he would begin to die, and he would keep dying, until he was dead. God was not keeping Adam and Eve from fulfillment in life: he was trying to help Adam make a wise choice and so avoid death. Alas, Adam opted for death.

Another highly popular explanation for death was promoted by Mr. Darwin in the nineteenth century, and of course by all his fans up to the present day. In Darwin’s theory death is nature’s way of disposing of the older, more primitive life forms, and giving rise to the new and more successful. Darwin believed that some races of man were more highly evolved than others, and would soon see their extinction. Yes-he was genuinely biased against certain groups of humans, a fact rarely included in discussions of the “elegance” of evolution theory.

Darwin himself had been influenced by others, particularly Herbert Spencer, who coined the word “evolution” and the phrase “survival of the fittest”. These concepts gave rise to “Social Darwinism” which saw wealthy, successful intellectuals as being more evolved than the poor and the weak, and later “eugenics”- the idea that the weakest in the human race should be discouraged or stopped from breeding. Such ideas were taken up and implemented very successfully by men like Adolph Hitler and Joseph Stalin*

The meaning of death in evolution, if we look at it honestly, is that it’s a vital part of the onward-and-upward trend of life on earth, including that of humanity: it’s a good thing. More specifically (and modern evolutionists generally avoid this aspect of the discussion too) the death of the less successful, the less attractive and the weak is necessary and inevitable. No wonder such men as Hitler liked the idea. And by the way, the meaning of life according to evolution is struggle and competition, so better your neighbors if you can.

This view of death demeans you. It makes your life little more than a stepping-stone for someone else’s. In the rising tide of atheism, unbelief and skepticism in our world, there are many who would read what I just wrote and then claim to be more than willing and happy to be one of those stepping stones. But for those who are not, there’s a far better explanation for death, and a hope beyond it which far outweighs any pain experienced on its arrival.

It’s sometimes said by the cynical that heaven is a fairy story for those who can’t face the thought of death. My view is that evolution is a fairy story for those who can’t face the thought of heaven, God or judgment. As I’ve written before many times, I’ve seen no evidence for evolution, and neither have you. Oh, you’ve seen different kinds of dogs, but they’re still dogs. You’ve seen people with black skin and white skin and yellow skin, but they’re still people. In contrast, I’ve seen plenty of evidence that there is an incredibly intelligent and powerful Creator, a creator who is eternal, and who therefore must have power over death.

The Bible gives an explanation for death which is, I believe, higher, deeper, and more noble than that of the evolutionist. For me it fits the whole claim found in the Bible that there is a holy God who has absolute standards. We as his creation, beginning with Adam and Eve, have failed to live up to those standards, and the result is death:

“The wages of sin is death” (Romans 6:23a)

A perfect God cannot allow a rebellious creation to live for ever: there has to be a check-point: a consequence and an answer to our fallen condition. However, the Bible teaches one death only.

A God who is able to make such an amazing, beautiful universe must also, as the Bible declares, be a loving God. And it’s that love which provides the antidote to death:

“But the gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord” (6:23b).

The gift of eternal life comes by a healing of our broken relationship with God in which God chooses to forgive us completely and put us on the right path. Death parts us from our fallen nature which caused the problem in the first place. It’s nothing but good news-the good news about Jesus Christ. Please see my recent post on the gospel: